People and economy

As a marginal environment in a mostly harsh climatic region, the Alaskan mountains have few areas suitable for settlement. Where they occur, settlements are limited to lower elevations or intermontane valleys. Only the coast mountains of southern Alaska and the panhandle support sizable populations. Anchorage is the most-populous urban area. Throughout the coastal sectors there also are widely scattered shoreline villages backed by mountains that descend abruptly to the coast. Commercial fishing, forestry, some mining, and tourism are the major economic activities in settled coastal areas. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, crosses the Brooks, Alaska, and Chugach ranges, terminating at the ice-free port of Valdez, east of Anchorage.

Mountain landscapes in the interior have soils underlain by permafrost and only short frost-free periods in summer, both of which inhibit agriculture. Moreover, solifluction—the downslope flow of waterlogged soil over subsurface permafrost—prohibits building construction and road development in many areas. Inhabited mostly by Alaskan Indians and Eskimos, interior settlements are isolated and depend largely on subsistence-level activities such as hunting, fishing, and fur trapping, with some farming. Arts and crafts are economically important in some areas. The major commercial activities in the mountain interior are metal (zinc, platinum, gold, and silver) and coal mining and forestry. There are some gold and silver mining operations in the mountains of the panhandle.

Study and exploration

Alaska has been fully mapped topographically from aerial photographs; the underlying geology of large areas, however, remains incompletely mapped. The United States Geological Survey, as part of the general reconnaissance mapping program from the late 19th century to the 1960s, did most of the geologic work, with some fieldwork also by the United States Bureau of Mines and the Alaska Department of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. Areas of potential mineral and transportation value have been mapped on a more-detailed basis by those state and federal agencies. Various university research parties also have contributed to the data, while some local site assessments and geologic mapping have been done by private mining and petroleum companies; that latter work rarely is made public.

Detailed glaciological studies in the Alaskan mountains began with the Harriman Alaska Expedition (1899), funded by the railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman. That journey was followed by expeditions of the National Geographic Society in the early and mid-20th century and field studies by the American Geographical Society, the Office of Naval Research, the Arctic Institute of North America, and the United States Geological Survey. The longest continuous glaciological study in the Alaskan mountains and ice fields has been conducted since 1946 by the Juneau Icefield Research Program in the Coast Mountains. Numerous other studies of varying duration have been carried out at a great many sites.